Sunday, March 8, 2009

How the Weekend Goes from Great to Crap

There’s a woman in our village who is probably in her late 50’s/early 60’s who colors her hair in ways you wouldn’t expect her to color it. Right now it's an electric blue. We just happened to be walking behind her on the way to town yesterday and I tried to take a picture but it was too dark and I was too far away to capture the color. Seeing even her coloring her hair in outrageous colors makes the conversation almost impossible to ignore. A. is desperate to color her hair but her school strictly forbids this. I made her a deal that if the grades were good she could do something this summer if I approved it, but it would have to go back to the usual when school started again. Here’s where if there really is an afterlife and my mom is able to watch A. and I interact, she is probably laughing her ass off, because just like any teenager, this deal isn’t good enough and gets questioned all the time and is a source of argument on a regular basis even though I never change the deal. I’ll give her this, she knows better than to disobey us and do it anyway. She told me that her good buddy is planning on writing a note to her parents, running upstairs and dying her hair and then when she comes down to face the wrath she plans to tell them, “I left you a note”. A told her buddy that if she did this her dad would kill her, bring her back to life to clean up the mess, and then kill her again which made me laugh out loud. As you can tell, this topic seems to be an obsession not just for A but for all of her friends.

And so it goes, mother and daughter walk into the village on a sunny Saturday morning. Mother is fully caffeinated and feeling very hopeful that this Saturday will be a relaxing and rejuvenating day with family. But alas, it is not to be, because the topic of hair color rears its ugly head, and the words that incense the mother come out of the daughter’s mouth, “it’s because we had to move here that my life is ruined”. Let’s just say that by the time we walk home, mostly not together, the temperature has changed and the tone for the day is set, and it’s not relaxing and rejuvenating, because after all to this 13 year old girl her parents hate her and like to see her miserable (her words). I think to myself, can I fast-forward to her being 25 and us laughing about this moment?

1 comment:

Beth said...

When she tells you that you hate her, you need to say, "Well, I've tried to hide that,but I guess it didn't work." It always made C & E say, "You do not." It just shows that regardless of what you tell teenagers, they disagree with you.